Steve Earle brings Karla Faye Tucker's life to the stage

Based on a true story

Published 4:30 am, Sunday, October 30, 2005

Texas singer-songwriter Steve Earle's play Karla opened off-off-Broadway last Sunday to mixed reviews. Earle, a longtime opponent of the death penalty, wrote the play about Karla Faye Tucker, who in 1998 was executed in Huntsville.

First staged in Nashville three years ago, the play now has a limited engagement at 45 Below Theatre, in the East Village.

The play begins with its protagonist's lifeless body on the gurney. Tucker (played by Obie winner Jodie Markell) arises to find herself in purgatory, where she recounts the story of her life, the gruesome pickax murders of her ex-boyfriend and his new flame, and her death-row conversion to Christianity.

The hard-living Earle, whose latest album and Air America radio show are both titled The Revolution Starts Now, has frequently discussed his own drug addiction and prison stint. He has said in interviews that in Karla his theme is "forgiveness."

"A well-intentioned but ultimately uncompelling new play," wrote Zachary Pincus-Roth in Newsday. He noted "a lulling effect that contributes to an intense, brooding mood -- but also becomes stupor-inducing" and objected to the "piling on of mundane details about Tucker's past." He felt the question of how anyone could commit such an act would be "more compelling than the death-penalty debate." But, he wrote, "a play set in purgatory is perhaps not the best way to answer that question."

In the New York Times, Phoebe Hoban wrote, "Earle's earnest drama shares strengths and weaknesses with the genre he is best known for: country music. It is strong on heartfelt narrative but equally strong on preachy sentiment and wishfulness."

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"If only the life-and-death issues at stake were as blindingly clear and bright as the spotlight used at intervals to indicate each character's ascent out of purgatory," Hoban wrote. "Earle has tackled a subject that demands much more than a well-meaning medley of sympathetic chords."